Neil LaBute has carved a career from seriously disturbing plays and films – In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things – that plunge deep into the American male psyche and find it to be damaged, selfish and brutal.

But now the writer and director is turning to a gentler, politer and certainly more English material: Agatha Christie. And, he says, he promises "a good romp and a cracking yarn".

LaBute is to direct a film of Christie's novel The Crooked House, with a screenplay adapted by Julian Fellowes, of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey fame. Though LaBute has ventured into period drama once before – Possession, the AS Byatt novel whose adaptation he directed, flips between the 19th and 20th centuries – he is certainly more associated with dystopian urban fables than the tinkling tea-cups and well-appointed drawing rooms of Christie's classic murder mysteries.

"I have always liked whodunnits," LaBute said. "And I mean real whodunnits, not mystery-slash-thriller-slash-horror whodunits. I thought, 'When did I last see one of those? And in fact it was probably Gosford Park: at least a nominal portion of Gosford Park had a whodunnit running through it."

As LaBute points out, The Crooked House is "atypical for Christie: often there is a small Belgian or an elderly lady solving the crimes". This novel, by contrast, features neither Hercule Poirot nor Miss Marple, but is a standalone story with a young man called Charles Hayward attempting to solve the mystery of the murder of the wealthy Aristide Leonides, with whose daughter, Sophie, he is in love. The entire extended family – the inhabitants of the "crooked house" – falls under suspicion.

Matthew Goode, who played Charles Ryder in the 2008 film of Brideshead Revisited, is to play Charles Hayward, with Gemma Arterton – who last year charmed Cannes with her performance in the title role of Tamara Drewe – as Sophia. Julie Andrews will play Aristide's bitter, repressed sister-in-law Edith de Haviland, and Gabriel Byrne, Sophia's elder brother Roger. The film is set to start shooting in September.

LaBute said of the character of Hayward: "To have someone so hellbent on finding out the truth and is asked huge moral questions – I don't often ask these questions of my boy-men characters, who are generally cowardly, duplicitous and selfish."

LaBute, whose work usually feels more akin to noir thriller writer Patricia Highsmith than Agatha Christie, said the novel was "twisted enough for me".

He added: "Christie may be even more twisted than I am. I think I may have met my match." In this book, he said, she was "in the vanguard of bad seeds".

But the writer and director – whom the New York Times has described as a specialist in "two-legged wolves and pigs who wear the camouflage of business suits and golf sweaters" – also declared himself an unlikely fan of the classic film adaptations of Christie novels of the 1970s. "I love what Sidney Lumet did with Murder on the Orient Express," he said. "And I love the almost kabuki-like performance of Albert Finney as Poirot."

He also expressed his admiration for David Suchet's bustling interpretation of the role for television, and Peter Ustinov's "bumbling" Poirot in Death on the Nile (1978).

LaBute declared himself enthusiastic about the period setting, and said that he wanted to introduce a feel of his favourite 1940s and 50s films. He namechecked Douglas Sirk, Powell and Pressburger, and said he was fan of "domestic noirs such as Mildred Pierce and especially Leave Her To Heaven". He wanted to create a feel, he said, of "deep Technicolor and dark shadows".

LaBute's cinematic and theatrical career has had its ups and downs. After a startling film debut with In the Company of Men, he hit a low point with a critically disastrous remake of The Wicker Man (2006). Known for his depiction of human, particularly male, cruelty, his latest play, In a Forest Dark and Deep is playing at the Vaudeville Theatre in London, with Matthew Fox, who starred in the television series Lost, and Olivia Williams. The Mercy Seat (2002), told the story of a man who uses his proximity to the September 11 attacks to disappear from his suburban life.